I was an all-Cisco guy for years until a Juniper switch showed me what I was missing

I had this whole mentality that Cisco was the only way to do enterprise networking right. I mean, that's what I learned on, that's what every job I had used. Then about 8 months ago I took a contract at a data center in Phoenix that was mostly Juniper gear. First week I was so frustrated I almost quit. The CLI felt backwards, the config hierarchy made no sense to me. But my lead there sat me down and walked through a simple BGP setup on a Juniper MX. That moment when I saw you can just 'show configuration' and the whole thing is plain text you can read like a book? That clicked. I realized Cisco's CLI is powerful but Juniper's commit model and structured config actually catches human error way better. I still use both now but I'm not gatekeeping Cisco anymore. Has anyone else had that flip happen where a different vendor's way of doing things just made more sense once you pushed through the learning curve?

2 comments

2 Comments

ryanh7717d ago

Oh man I gotta disagree with you there. I've been using both for years and I still can't stand Juniper's CLI. The whole commit model slows me down when I'm just trying to test something quick in a lab. Cisco's "do it live" approach might bite you sometimes but it's way faster for figuring things out on the fly. I also hate how Juniper hides the actual interface names behind those weird port numbers.

oliviabennett17d ago

I read that Juniper's commit model prevents those 2 AM outages Cisco's "copy run start" can cause.